Book: W.H. offered Craig judgeship

President Barack Obama tried to avoid a high-profile ouster of his original White House counsel, Gregory B. Craig, by coaxing him out of his job and into a federal judgeship, according to a new book.

Craig declined Obama’s offer, and his forced removal — which he learned of while reading the morning paper — caused a backlash by Craig’s Washington loyalists, who felt he was being treated shabbily, and by many liberals, who believed he was being punished for trying to fulfill Obama’s failed campaign promise to shut the terrorist detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

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The details on last fall’s Craig imbroglio are among the revelations in Jonathan Alter’s “The Promise: President Obama, Year One,” a behind-the-scenes narrative of the administration’s first year that comes out Tuesday.

In the first substantial, reported book about the Obama White House, Alter explains that Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel felt Craig was trying to build up his own mini-National Security Council instead of focusing on bread-and-butter legal issues.

Emanuel became furious after Craig, in an apparent show of solidarity with former detainees, traveled with four Chinese Muslim Uighurs from Guantanamo to Bermuda.

Obama called in sympathy after The Washington Post story about his ouster, and Craig said nothing critical about Obama when Alter talked to him.

Craig isn’t the only person to have run-ins with Emanuel, who plays to his reputation as a trash-talking, F-bomb-dropping operative in Alter’s 458 pages. The book contributes to an emerging perception of a male-oriented West Wing where aides jostle for position through locker-room badinage. Certain employees loved when “Rahmbo” called them “princess.”

Others didn’t.

“Take your f—ing tampon out and tell me what you have to say,” Emanuel told an unnamed male aide during a meeting in his office, wrote Alter, who asserts that reports Emanuel “mellowed over time were untrue.”

Emanuel denied that he harassed Rep. Eric Massa (D-N.Y.) in the shower of the House gym, but Alter reports that Emanuel did dress down Massa over the phone.

The book offers new evidence of early tension between the White House and Democratic leaders in Congress. Speaker Nancy Pelosi fumed in Jan. 2009 when Obama said he had “no pride of authorship” in the stimulus bill, despite how hard he lobbied Democrats to take the politically costly votes for it. Emanuel encouraged conservative Democrats to criticize the package so Pelosi would strip out unpopular sections.

“The president threw me off the truck,” Pelosi said privately.

Obama’s nickname for Larry Summers, the chairman of the National Economic Council, is “Dr. Kevorkian,” Alter says. The president made fun of him for falling asleep at meetings and sweating in winter.

Summers had been Harvard’s president, but he stepped down after an uproar over comments he made about women’s scientific abilities. That made him sensitive to criticisms of sexism after Christina Romer balked that he tried to cut her out of important meetings.